Most optical drives today are combo CD/DVD drives that support DVDs and all the CD formats: CD audio, CD-ROM, CD-R and CD-RW. The speeds of the drives are rated by their CD-ROM and DVD transfer rates.

Modern CD-ROM drives also play audio CDs. See CD-ROM and CD-ROM drives. THIS DEFINITION IS FOR PERSONAL USE ONLY. All other reproduction requires permission.

A mildly annoying trend over recent years has been for USB hardware devices to expose a CD-ROM drive containing their drivers for Windows users. Of course there’s no real CD in there ...

It’s something [Daniel1111] has done with his Arduino CD player, which uses the little microcontroller board to control a CD-ROM drive via its IDE bus.

That kind of speed is technically achievable with 48x or 52x CD drives – exactly the sort of performance metrics PC enthusiasts coveted in the early 2000s. However, the MythBusters team couldn't ...